Daily Archives:October 3rd, 2006

ScanR – image services by email

ScanR is a lovely service. Take a picture of a document, whiteboard or business card with your digital camera or mobile phone. Email it to ScanR:

  • to wb@scanr.com if it’s a whiteboard image – you’ll get back a nice clean PDF version
  • to doc@scanr.com if a document – you get back a clean PDF that has supposedly been OCRed – the OCR didn’t really work for me, though the image was good.
  • to bc@scanr.com if it’s a business card, and you get back not just an image but a .vcf file as well, which you can just double-click to put into your address book. On the card I tried, the text was OCRed perfectly but not put into the correct fields – however, all the data was there in the comments section, so I could find the card by searching for any of it, and copy and paste it into the right fields if wanted.

The nice thing, of course, is that you can do all of this directly from your phone. If you have a phone with a camera in it, which at present I don’t…

Copying the copy-protection

Jon Lech Johansen, best known for breaking the encryption on DVDs so that Linux users could also watch them, is now creating encryption. Well, sort of…

He has reverse-engineered Apple’s Fairplay and is starting to license it to companies who want their media to play on Apple’s devices. Instead of breaking the DRM (something he’s already done), Jon has replicated it…

(from GigaOM)

This lets media-producers use Apple’s DRM without having to talk to Apple. (Of course, it’s worth remembering that Apple’s system will also play non-DRMed material). It’s not a long-term business strategy, I shouldn’t think, because Apple owns the whole chain at the moment and so can change Fairplay to an incompatible system in future without affecting their users too much. That would, however, involve re-encoding the media that currently works, so it’s probably something they wouldn’t want to do…

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser